


For Now

by MiaGhost



Series: For Life, For Love, For Blood and Glory. [10]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Blood, F/M, Internal Conflict, Memories, Minor Violence, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Part 10 of LifeLoveBloodAndGlory, Swearing, Unrequited Love, Vomiting, Worry, Wraith Loves Elliot Witt and maybe she needs to freaking admit it already, Wraith being Wraith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23665978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaGhost/pseuds/MiaGhost
Summary: Running is something Wraith has always been good at.But running is taking its toll, and with their next Games coming up, she's got to face her own mind.
Relationships: Mirage | Elliott Witt/Wraith | Renee Blasey
Series: For Life, For Love, For Blood and Glory. [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1591393
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	For Now

~.~

"It would make sense for you to have your own room, that's all I'm saying." he shrugged.

"You love this place," she argued, frown settling on her face.

 _I_ love this place, she didn't say.

"Well yeah, but I'd love a new place too. Once I got used to it."

Wraith's heart gave a gentle throb, that he cared so much.

It was simply too much, for now.

The moment fell quiet, and eventually Wraith sighed. She struggled to find a way to convey that she appreciated the gesture for what it was, but doing so would leave her vulnerable. She posed each word carefully, avoiding looking directly at him.

"I just think it'd be smartest not to uproot right now. Not during the season."

"You don't think I could handle the stress? Or perhaps _you_ couldn't handle living with all of this." he teased, gesturing to himself where he was draped lazily on the couch, and making her roll her eyes.

He wasn't to know that the joke hit just a touch closer to home than it was really meant to.

"Whatever." she hummed, making sure to sound unimpressed, "I think you're better leaving it."

"Yeah. For now, at least."

Wraith's mouth quirked at his choice of words, wondering if he even had any idea how they echoed in her head. He nudged her with an elbow when she didn't reply.

"What?" he asked, clearly having caught her expression.

She shook her head gently, meeting his eye.

"Nothing. Just… the words."

His eyes lit with recognition, smile sliding further into teasing.

"What, you know something about another time?"

She shook her head again, but he poked her with a quiet chuckle.

"Didn't get a look? Can't point your psychic eye that way?"

She raised her eyes to the heavens, heaving a sigh of exasperation that only made him laugh again.

"I know, I know. Doesn't work that way. Still," he bumped their shoulders together, "it'd be useful to know, huh? How it'd turn out if we did."

Wraith felt her lips rise at the edges.

"Probably kill each other."

Elliot's laugh was surprised and so it was unrefined, free in a way that he still didn't often sound, embarrassed as he was about it. It was Wraith's favourite though, the truest sound of Elliot that could be. Her chest pulsed, and she swallowed and looked away as he settled beside her on the couch.

Living with him would be a brand of torture. She needed the dorms. She needed that important distance, that wall there. He'd knocked down plenty in their time, on their journey to where they were now, as close as they were. But moving in, living officially with him in the city, was just…

A step she wasn't sure was a good idea for her.

Wraith was sure suddenly, that she'd been right there before. The air shifted, just a fraction. She felt her heartbeat slow. Not her, but time, stretching in her head. She blinked and looked around as the breath ran over her arm, and her flesh raised in goosebumps.

This wasn't happening now, she thought suddenly, it _had_ happened. Only...

"Wraith…"

Instinct caught hold of her, freezing her in place as her head inched slowly to face him. The brightly lit apartment suddenly wasn't, the bulbs dimming and flickering like candlelight. Her breath came out almost cold. The air was wrong. What place had she stepped into?

Elliot was pale and ghostly as he stared at her, colour fading around him as though the gathering shadows had drank them, and something small and primal somewhere inside Wraith quivered. His amber eyes were blown wide, brow hesitantly drawing together in confusion. Bloodied saliva dripped from one edge of his bottom lip. She knew what she'd find when her gaze flickered downward, but she was compelled to see, anyway.

His fingers, pale and unnaturally long, were splayed across the growing dark patch on his shirt. The faint scent of gunpowder tickled her nose, and her breath hitched to draw it inside. It bloomed in her lungs, suddenly choke, the taste of copper on her tongue. He leaned towards her but she flinched away, her heart no longer slowed but racing fast and furious in her ribcage as her gaze was drawn, inevitably, back to his face. His lips, blue under the blood. His cheeks falling sallow and sunken, and the most painful, his eyes, dulling in the dying light as the life was leaving him.

"No."

The whimper was insubstantial with pain, tainted like a shade with fear. It was pitiful. And it was hers. Nausea rose as a shambling stone, grating the lining of her oesophagus. He looked wounded, afraid, and when his breath whistled from him it blew scarlet droplets from his mouth. Wraith jerked when it splashed across her face, and the Void whispered to her of another moment, his blood sprayed across her face just like it, from the snarled punch of a shotgun.

The two moments overlaid in her head, Wraith felt the rippling tearing of the fabric between the worlds.

"This isn't mine," she whispered, but her fingers did slide through the slick of blood when they found her face.

She stared at it, her hand held between them as his breathing rattled wetly, weakly, fading. She looked to him, and she felt her confidence fading too. The shadows trembled in the corners of the room, pressing against the pale pools cast by the small points of light. She swallowed to wet her throat.

"This isn't my time," she insisted, but even she could hear how uncertain it sounded.

The blood on her skin was still cooling. It felt real, it felt like it was real. The room was fading around them. Falling to the hunger of the shadows. The lights would fall too, premonition told her. As he would, claimed by the darkness she would see writhing, waiting. His bloodied hand snaked out and caught her wrist so fast it made her shriek, his eyes devoid of him, mere black pits that reflected the tricky glow of the Void she knew had a hand in this.

He made a burbled, bubbled sound like he was drowning. But she knew it to be her own name, and it loosed something hysterical in her gut as she tried to pull away. His stared at her, dead. They were dead, like he was dead, like _she_ would be dead if she couldn't get away.

It was while Wraith was devolving into frenzied twisting and struggling that she gasped a breath in the darkness of her own dorm room. She felt the vomit rising and barely made it to the little bathroom, most of her stomach contents missing the toilet bowl and splashing elsewhere.

She heaved until she was left trembling, her throat and mouth burned and stinging. She collapsed weakly against the edge of the bathtub, head thunking the ceramic with a dull ache. The room smelled sour and acidic, turning her empty stomach. She groaned and ran a hand through her hair, heavy with sweat and sticking to the clammy skin at her forehead.

She sat with her eyes closed for a long time, working to find her centre and calm the jittering of her nerves. Fear was an old friend of Wraith's, one she often waved to as she skirted it, for it could never quite sink its claws into her the way it wanted to.

But this… this was getting worse. She wasn't going to be able to hide from it, anymore. The fear he roused in that small part of her, the way she saw the Arena now that she hadn't before.

She hauled herself to bed after rinsing the taste of stale alcohol and stomach acid from her mouth as best she could. The mess could wait until morning.

Wraith lay in the dark counting her breaths as the last grasp go the nightmare finally let her go. She was exhausted, worn out physically and mentally, drawn thin like a wire ready to snap.

She needed real sleep. She needed to be able to close her eyes without seeing him die.

What the Void and the Voices showed her was only the possibilities that the paths she chose could set in motion. But so many had rung true for her so far that she couldn't convince herself any more.

One day, she was going to lose him.

One day, Elliot was going to die and she'd still be there, left behind.

One day, the Games were going to take from her the only thing she had ever truly learned to how to love.

Her whole life, Wraith had played the long game. It came with the territory, the knowledge that there were infinite times out there, infinite numbers of choices she had made, was making, would make. She lived and survived in her own time with the help of the Voices and her instincts, and she had always been able to somehow translate such a mindset with that of her survival, of what was her _Now_ , regardless of what the Void could show her.

But everything was different when he came into the mix. It hadn't been at first.

At first, they had been another pair assigned to her by the powers that be in GameMakers ranks. They already worked together, Mirage and Pathfinder. They'd obviously had squadmates before her, though by unspoken agreement she knew nothing of them. For whatever reasons, they were each no longer there. And she was.

At first, that's all they were. Her squad. She survived as she always had, and either they would do the same or not. And then, she pulled them from the fire the first time, and it changed a little. People she would kill to keep alive, if she could. People she would win with, people who could survive. They'd kept up with her, they'd pulled their own weight, and together the three had found a rhythm.

Maybe it was a surprise, maybe not, but they'd found that rhythm… and it _worked_.

And then, they'd become her allies. She trusted them with her life. And after a while, with herself. Or what of it she could bare to show them. She'd kill for them, fight to the end for them, risk everything. They were her friends. They were the only two beings she had ever cared about. And she cared a great deal for them, that had been another frightening revelation, dawning slowly upon her around their second year mark.

If pushed, she could admit that they were family, even if only deep down in her own soul.

But now, lying in the dark after another nightmare, another old memory twisted and blackened with smoke and embers, she was faced by it truly, and it made her soul quail that she was unable to hide.

Their next Game was only days away. She'd returned to the GamesHub only today. She refused to admit she'd been hiding, but in truth she had been. She'd been running from it. From him, now that he knew.

Frustrating disappointment welled, familiar and tiring, in her throat.

She'd lost part of the pain, drinking. But it hadn't been enough, and she'd stumbled to his doorway. Like she always seemed to, now. Drawn by some silent siren song, because even though she might hate it, sometimes he was the only thing that could help her sleep.

That would stop, now. It would have to, a crack in her foundation that threatened to tear her whole existence down. She didn't need another, she needed only herself. She'd always believed that. Always _had_ to believe it, or die.

Even if he could forgive her for saying it, even if he could promise to forget it, it would always be there, in that moment of their past, hanging heavily and poignantly in the air. Even if he actually believed he could pretend she hadn't exposed that raw, defenceless spot in her heart to him, she'd never be able to. And it would destroy her.

 _He_ could destroy her. It terrified her, and she knew that's why the dreams were getting worse, the Void bleeding into them more than usual. It was a punishment, of sorts. For a whisper in the dark that would undo her, unravel every little thing that she had fought and clawed so hard for.

_You told him._

Wraith turned onto her side as though she could ignore the murmur. Her gut heaved again with the slimy chill of dread.

_He'll never forget._

_Careful._

_It changes everything._

_You need to be careful of this choice._

_Wraith._

She closed her eyes and fought the shake in her breath. The Voices drifted across her mind, pressing closer to where she hid, repeating themselves slowly in their whispers. She knew what would happen, if she ignored them. They would only get louder, and things would go wrong. She'd lose her grip, tenuous as it could be.

And the Game, three days. She couldn't avoid him, then. She had to get her head planted firmly again. They all knew what would happen, if either of them let distraction pull them from course. The paths were many, and Wraith knew some of them better than she'd like. She'd have to box this, cram it down somewhere and lock it away, and she'd have to trust that he would forgive her absence enough to keep his head in the fight too.

Wraith had to, for her own survival, force it from her mind. She reached for the calm of her breath. She let her heartbeat gradually slow. Darkness waited behind her eyelids, and though now part of her feared it, she needed it.

She breathed out, feeling the memory of gentle heat as she slipped under, Mirage's heat, Elliot's heat, facing her after she asked him to stay. His breath a gentle ghosting across her cheek. The sound of his existence. Wraith let the memory take her, for now. Dealing with its aftermath could wait. The drowsiness returned like a fog as it had then, the smell of alcohol and Elliot's bed, the brush of the sheets when he shifted. The gentle fabric of his shirt under her fingers.

The sound of his voice growing quiet, the air only stirring with their breath. Alcohol was a pleasant, foggy blur that cushioned her. It took her defences down just enough before she could find the care to stop it, just as it had then. It pulsed in her breastbone again. The affection with the depth of the sea. It rose to her tongue once more.

As she fell asleep, Wraith said it again. Her lips compelled by a force she wasn't sure was her own.

_I love you._

~.~


End file.
